User blog:Notdn/Proposal: The more powers you have, the more your vote should count on requests and proposals
(This is modified from my former proposal to favor votes made by bureaucrats against all other users. I realize now that this would have had many flaws, so I'm fixing it while still proposing a system that weights your vote based on how much experience you have.) Currently, there is no difference between a vote made on a request or proposal by a well-respected user who has been on the wiki for 5 years and a vote made by some random Fandom user who strolled into the wiki 5 minutes ago. Ultimately, this means if those are the only two votes on a proposal and they disagree, the proposal will not pass. This should not be a thing! Our system as it stands right now is flawed. The flaw with our system is that the votes don't take into account the user making the vote. As in my example, this means whether you have 5 years or 5 minutes of experience, your vote counts exactly as much. While this seems like a great way for every user to get their opinion heard, it also means that users who literally don't know better than administrators can still override their vote. As of right now, that means it's up to the administrators to share their reasoning and only hope to convince users that don't have as much experience that they're in the right. This becomes even more flawed when you factor in the obvious fact that there are far fewer administrators and bureaucrats than there are users without power, and ultimately, without as much experience. Of course, there are a few odd cases where a user has created a new account and hasn't gotten their powers back, but we'll ignore that for right now because that makes things really complicated. How am I proposing that we fix this? Weight each user's vote based on what powers they have. To users without powers, this sounds crazy at first, but please, stay with me. By the end, I hope to convince everybody that this is the most fair and justified way of dealing with the problems in our voting system. Here are the weights I'm proposing, where a user's group is the highest level of access they have (powers), each group will have their vote multiplied by their weight factor, and each individual role group vote will add up for the final vote, which will be used as the community consensus, e.g. if that final vote is 60% or more, the proposal passes. *'No roles' - 5% *'Chat moderator' OR discussions moderator - 10% *'Rollback' OR content moderator - 15% ''- Note: I'm probably going to balance rollback/content moderator and administrator to be the same percentage.'' *'Administrator' - 30% *'Bureaucrat' - 40% (These percentages are flexible and if this proposal passes, I'm open to letting the community decide the numbers for themselves.) To calculate the final vote, we simply use this equation: This equation effectively weights each individual group's vote at its percentage, then adds them all up for a total vote out of 100%. This system already raises one question: What happens if not at least one user from each group has voted on the proposal? It's simple: in the equation, we replace each missing group with 0, and subtract its weight factor from the 1.00 on the bottom. For example, if neither a bureaucrat nor rollback has voted on a proposal, those groups won't be counted, and the vote will be out of 0.45. This will still give us a percentage out of 100%, but each group that did vote gets a bigger piece of the pie. So what do you guys think? I personally believe this is the most fair way to count votes in a request or proposal, since it directly factors in a user's experience based on what powers they have. As I said before, special cases would have to be made for certain users who, for example, are using a new account but have years of experience, but otherwise I think this would work pretty well. Again, I am not in any way trying to diminish the opinion of users without roles. This system is meant to count votes while considering the fact that a user who's had enough experience to become an administrator should definitely know more than some rando that showed up 5 minutes ago. Also, as I said, the percentages are flexible, and are open for the community decide -- I simply chose arbitrary numbers for this example, but there are smarter ways of figuring out fair percentages. Finally, I am most definitely not saying administrators and bureaucrats matter more than other users. It's just a simple fact that users who have worked their way up to that position have more experience, and ultimately know better. I'm also open for suggestions to improve the system, and very likely will update the blog post to reflect any changes. Category:Blog posts Category:Proposals